Category

The Girls

Peri

I love this drawing. One day I took my crayons, markers, and pencils to work, and on my lunch break took a big deep breath and started to draw. I drew fast and I drew furiously. I didn’t think. I told myself I didn’t care how it came out that I just needed to do it in a spirit of spontaneity. Since I only had a half hour for lunch, I was driven to create a finished design in that amount of time. My coworkers kept coming in and asking me what I was doing and I kept telling them I was stepping outside of my box. They loved the finished drawing, even more than I did at the onset.

At first I named it/her Freedom because that is the process she embodied (and the quest that I am always in search of) and signed it. However, as the series continued and all the girls had names, it seemed rightly that she should be called Peri. I edited out the word Freedom in photoshop, but left it to remain on the prototype as a reminder of my original and ongoing pursuit.

Peri, as the name suggests in Persian mythology, is a mythical being originally represented as evil but subsequently as a good or graceful genie or fairy. This was not what my parents had in mind when they named me after my great grandmother Pearl. But for the sake of the story and the drawing, Peri is lighthearted, spontaneous and joyful. She is captivated by nature and collects more flowers than her arms can hold. She fills her home and her landscape with color and whimsy and ALWAYS finds time to smell the roses. She floats down rivers, rolls down hills with her dogs, will climb the highest mountain to see the view and believes in magic. She dances, she makes up songs, she sings at the top of her lungs, and she believes that life is good, that beauty abounds, and that God is eternal.